Back to category: History

Limited version - please login or register to view the entire paper.

The South's Inner Civil War

The South had a sort of "inner civil war" within itself during the Civil War. Not all Southerners supported the Confederacy. Four million southern slaves supported the Union, and numerous white Southerners eventually believed that they could lose more from continuing the war than from losing the war. The South was filled with dissent. From the outset of the Civil War, disloyalty was prevalent among the yeoman's Southern mountains, but eventually it spread to other Southerners as well because of the social and economic costs of the war, slave attitudes, and the conscription laws.
In East Tennessee, the people were completely remote from the rest of the state. There were few supporters of the Confederacy, and the populated mountainous area voted two to one to stay with the Union. The mountain population had been economically and politically overshadowed by the "wealthier, slave owning counties in the west." There were two different priorities in the West and East parts of Te...

Posted by: Sean Wilson

Limited version - please login or register to view the entire paper.